During her
tour, Donna will be awarding
a print copy of The Delphi Bloodline,
Born to Sing, Scheming, or Dreaming in Los
Angeles to a randomly drawn winner. To be entered for a chance to win, use
the form below. To increase your
chances of winning, feel free to visit her other tour stops and enter there,
too!
Donna
Del Oro lives in Northern California with her husband and three cats. She taught
high school and community college English classes for 30+ years and is now
happily retired. When not writing novels or reading voraciously, she travels
and sings with the medal winning Sacramento Valley Chorus.
Donna is a member of
Capitol Crimes, the Sacramento chapter of Sisters in Crime in addition to the
Valleyrose chapter of the RWA. She has judged RITA entries and does
developmental editing on the side. Two of her novels, Operation Familia and
Born To Sing, have won national and international awards.
Follow clairvoyant
artist Athena Butler in the next book in The Delphi Bloodline series: Athena’s Quest.
Excerpt from Athena’s Secrets:
“Got it.” She
slowly mounted, excitement and fear surging through her. He counter-balanced
her weight while she settled in back and clasped her arms around his waist.
“What did you
think of your portrait?” She’d given the painting to his parents the night
before and they’d hung it over the fireplace mantel after much ado.
He was silent
as he backed up the Jet Ski and maneuvered a turnaround as he pointed the bow
towards the open water. Before taking off across the lake, he worked the
throttle a bit to juice up the engine. Then he turned his head to look at
her. His guard was down. No stone wall
this time.
“I liked it.
You captured a side of me that I forgot was even there. I looked young,
idealistic. I’d forgotten I was like that once. You’ve got a lot of talent,
Athena.”
She’s a girl
but looks like a woman. What would it be like to make love to her? She could
even be the one Mom has foreseen in my future, or maybe not…don’t even go
there, just Mom’s fantasy dream, wants me to settle down…Never mind, it’s all
nonsense, even though it’s superstitious of me to refuse to ride in a car with
Alex, my own brother…just bullshit the way Mom manipulates us… Might as well
not tempt fate, she tells us…she’s right most of the time… Fate? Is this pretty
girl my fate? Hell if I know…this girl, Athena, she’s like a magnet, no doubt
she has a powerful pull on me… I’ve got such a hard-on for her…oh well, the cold
water will take care of that soon enough… I’m a big boy, I can resist her if I
want to…
Do I want to?
His thoughts
and feelings revealed so much more than what he said. Now she knew he liked
her. Very much. As much as she liked him.
And now for
the special feature:
Behind Athena’s Secrets and The Delphi
Bloodline Series: Questions about ESP
Sixty percent of Americans,
according to parapsychology studies cited in the book, Psychic Awareness, claim
to have had experiences they would call psychic. Those experiences might be:
Hunches about your or someone else’s future; physical clues that alert you to
danger or wrong decisions; intuitive feelings that guide you correctly through
life; and/or receiving information through physical sensations, thoughts,
visions or emotions. It could be a prickly sensation at the back of your neck
about a particular person, place or thing. Or a warm feeling at the thought of
a good decision. If you’ve experienced any of the above, then you’re in touch
with your psychic abilities.
My heroine, Athena Butler in Athena’s Secrets (Book One in The Delphi
Bloodline Series), has already moved beyond the “I know but I don’t know how I
know” psychic awareness, where most of us are at. Through her gifted mother’s
instruction and guidance, Athena—the modern-day descendant of an ancient,
psychically powerful bloodline of women—knows HOW and WHY she knows. There are
numerous theories her mother and an Institute for Psychic Research classes have
taught her are valid and might offer her an explanation. Her mother sees their
clairvoyance as a Gift from God; that they (and their bloodline) were chosen to
use their gift for the Greater Good. Athena’s not so sure about that. In her
view, their Gift is also a Curse.
She’s
a talented clairvoyant who sees visions and is able to access information
simply by touching a person. This clairvoyance might take the form of reading
that person’s thoughts or by seeing into that person’s past.
While this ability of hers has
caused her to lose boyfriends—who resent her intrusion into their privacy—her
clairvoyance also alerts her to danger. Although warned to keep her Gift a
secret, Athena is roped into helping law enforcement authorities with a Metro
PD investigation into a series of murders of young girls. And then, when her
father at the British Embassy uncover a possible plot to murder the Embassy
staff, Athena is asked to help the security team thwart the attack. In Book
Two, Athena’s Quest, she must help
homicide detectives expose a serial killer. When a handsome stranger approaches
her in a Reno hotel gallery (Book Three), where she is painting dead
celebrities like Elvis and Frank Sinatra, Athena shakes his hand. Immediately,
visions of his dark, violent past assail her, warning her that he is an
impostor and even worse, that he means her harm.
So what’s the origin of such psychic
abilities? Are these talents truly genetic, do they run in families, as I
suggest in my novel? Do they originate from an all-seeing God, as Athena’s
mother believes? Do they come from an omniscient spirit world? Another
dimension of energy as yet unexplored by man, as Athena believes? Or are they
simply physical, biochemical reactions in the brain, as some neuroscientists
suggest? Do brain waves play a role, as some parapsychologists have studied?
That Theta brain waves in a fully conscious state enable a person to access
knowledge in what some parapsychologists call The Collective Consciousness, and
what Hindus call humankind’s Akashic Records.
Sorry to disappoint you, but experts
have no definitive answers to those questions. Theories abound and what I put
forth in The Delphi Bloodline series is just one theory. There are many
theories about psychic abilities, but no scientific proof.
Not
yet, anyway.
What
the scientific experiments (and I include some of these experiments in my third
novel in the series) do prove is that these abilities exist in varying degrees
among all of us. These are human abilities, like innate skills in art and
music. Some of us can strum a few chords on a ukelele; others among us can
write symphonies, like Beethoven and Gershwin. Some of us can paint by numbers;
others become Titian, Michaelangelo, and Da Vinci.
The
true psychics among us—not the charlatans—exercise and develop their
extrasensory skills quietly and without fanfare or greed. For they know their
gifts come with cautionary tales.
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